[lbo-talk] Caudwell on on language's inability to reflect the changing nature of reality

Charles Brown cb31450 at gmail.com
Sun Jan 5 10:44:34 PST 2014


"Reality constitutes for us our environment. and our environment , which is chiefly social, alters continuously -sometimes barely perceptibly, sometimes at dizzy speeds. The socially accepted pictures we make in words of reality cannot change as if they were reflections in a mirror. An object is reflected in a mirror. An object is reflected in a mirror. If the object moves the reflection moves. But in language reality is symbolised in unchanging words which give a false stability and permanence to the object they represent. Thus they instantaneously photograph reality rather than reflect it. This frigid character of language is regrettable but it has utilitarian purposes . It is probably the only way in which man, with his linear consciousness, can get a grip of fluid reality. Language, as it develops, shows more and more of this false permanence, till we arrive at the Platonic Ideas, Eternal and Perfect Words. Their eternity and perfection are simply the permanence of print and paper. If you coin a word or write a symbol to describe an entity or event, the word will remain 'eternally' unchanged even while the entity has changed and the event is no longer present. This permanence is part of the inescapable nature of symbolism, which is expressed in the rules of logic. It is one of the strange freaks of the human mind that it is supposed that reality must obey the rules of logic, whereas the correct view is that symbolism by its very nature has certain rules, expressed in laws of logic,and these are nothing to do with the process of reality, but represent the nature of the symbolic process itself." - Christopher Caudwell from "A Study of the Bourgeois Artist" in _Studies in s Dying Culture_



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